Defense of the Ancients 2 Announced by Valve
With the recent surge in Defense of the Ancients-like games, it was only a matter of time before a larger developer picked up on it (that wasn’t Stardock). Well, if you were looking for a full-fledged, possibly retail box version of some iteration of DotA, you might not have to look much further than next year.With Valve having hired Icefrog (seriously, no one knows his real name) around a year ago, most people probably saw the announcement of DotA 2 coming. I know I did. When I first read the headline I thought “Oh god, not this again…”, as I figured it was just going to be a simple re-hash of the original game jammed into the Source Engine. Then I remembered it was Valve, and they wouldn’t let something like that get pushed out.
Game Informer has a good exclusive on the announcement, having actually played a build of the game. It’s mostly just a history of DotA and the genre, followed by some talk about the new features and improvements to the source engine that Valve are bringing to the table.
Some of the game’s features seem really awesome, like the integration with Steamworks, the “coaching system”, and especially the interactive guides. No longer will you have to sift through tens of fansites and hard to read forums trying to find the item and skill builds that the pros use, they’ll just be at the click of a button, and you’ll already be practicing with them in a game against bots (presumably).
I’m looking forward to more competition in this space. A larger developer behind a project like this will definitely give Riot games’ League of Legends (my personal favorite of the bunch so far) and S2’s Heroes of Newerth a run for their money.
Fun fact: Game Informer used my favorite Hero from DotA (Morphling) as their header image :)